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You should be able to do almost anything you want while waiting in queue. For example in Rocket League I can do any training pack I want. I'd love to be able to just open up like an aim practice range (we have a lot of these now with the workshop) or something while waiting in queue.

If you mean practice range, don't think there's anything different but the fact that it's for one person only. So instead of needing 1 server for every 12 people in q like in skirmish, you'd need 12 so a lot more taxing.

You're not thinking about what happens in the background when you start a server.

Practice range as a waiting lobby needs 12 times more sever instances per player, that are constantly being started and stopped. Even if it was free, increasing server load more than 10x so players can shoot slightly different targets is a terrible trade off.

This would be ideal, but I think that it will never happen, they don't seem to want server code in the hands of users. For security, or to prevent reverse engineering, or both. I don't like it, but also I'm not sure I can blame them.

Granted, they could make a different kind of server for practice range, but that'd probably be overkill in this situation.

Blizzard doesn't want you to have Overwatch's server code, as is the case with most of their games.

It's not really unreasonable of them, they want to keep control of the product they made, and requiring that players use the official platform is a pretty solid way of maintaining that control.

Additionally, now that there's stable, ubiquitous corporate hosting options like AWS all around the world, there isn't really the need for Blizzard to release a client. Why lose the ability to garrentee a certain play experience?

I know we're all the end users, but take a second to look at the issue from their point of view as well.

Server instances don't work like that. There's a minimum amount of framework that must be used to make a functional server.

You can not simply divide a server "in twelve" and go on as normal. You end up needing at minimum several times the amount of threads, ram, and overall work on the server hardware to get the result you want.

You seem to have an expectation that the company should be throwing money at non issues on principle, and not doing so is somehow "cheap". It's not, at all. It's a trade-off, how much captial do we need to spend to get a result, be it dev time, money, hardware, etc. To get a result.

What you are asking for is a frankly huge expenditure of captial for virtually no reason. It would be more complex on Blizzards end, with very little gained for the players.

I'm not dismissing any technical issues, I'm replying to that guy and his hypothesis. In my initial message I was genuinely wondering whether there are any technical issues at all. Obviously we'll never really know, it's just that from a player POV, the current functionality is so close to being able to enter a custom game and such that it seems weird that there would be some technical limitations, albeit definitely possible, as I said. We already know they literally spin up small compartimentalized servers with their own VCPU and limits, so I also wonder why they can't spin smaller ones (but this one is just that, a question).

And how are they unjustified? They make perfect sense, however if putting more money into servers would "solve" this issue, they're being cheap in this regard. I've developed multiplayer games, I have been on their side, and I don't blame them - as a company you have to maximize profits after all. Now, as a player I would really really like if they just let me do SOMETHING while q'ing that doesn't involve alttabing out of the game all the time

Because it doesn't matter how many devs you throw at a problem, it takes a certain number of hours to make something, and make sure it works. Hell, sometimes more people just adds coordination overhead and makes it worse.

You can't just have people doing random trivial side jobs all the time and expect to keep major projects on schedule, such as new characters, new maps, balance changes, stability improvements, etc.

I take that most of the people complaining about this kind of thing have had to work on any kind of development project at all...

The usual reply to this I see is it takes more server load as you have to have a new server instance for each player instead of having one server instance for up to 11 players for skirmish. Having training range playable offline just makes it easier for people to develop hacks.

Isn't the training arena hosted on the client? I thought that was the explanation for why you can't join it with your party. If it's local, why can't you join it while queued, and if it's hosted on the server, why can't you join it with a party.

There was a bug a while back that allowed you to invite a friend into training range but it got fixed because it caused stability issues not sure if it was because of the bug itself or because of the map having more than one person. Or it could just be a game design thing with training range not designed for more than one person. Devs have said that they wanted to do more with training range just other things have higher priority.

Like I said it makes creating hacks easier. All the interactions are handled server side currently so no one can see it. If it was made available client side people can datamine how everything works and create better hacks.

Revamp the training range and allow us to opt into a multi player training range during queue times. Bigger area, implement a ton of the things that have been suggested and created within the workshop. If I could somehow play the workshop aim trainer game while queuing it would be perfect for me.

I'm just suggesting a way that seems very easy on developers to minimize the 'cons' of role-queue. Telling people ahead of time about a part of role-queue that might kinda suck doesn't actually help anything lol

Yeah it does. It manages expectations. If they came out and said that it would be just as fast as the others and then wasn't, everyone would flip shit. But they said it was gonna be much worse than it actually seems to be. So now the playerbase as a whole is generally happier.

No one is holding a gun to your head to only do things available in the game. Pick up a book and read a few pages. Make a ranty post on reddit like this from your phone. I hope you aren't one of the people that was begging for role queue in the first place cause this is what they said was gonna happen.

Guessing there may be a lot of tank/supp players who are interested in coming back, since now ranked has some measure of stability with 2-2-2 and no more bickering about who plays what with Role Queue.

Im a tank player but back when queue did take longer I usually watch youtube or twitch. I don’t see why blizzard should take time developing this instead of something else if you can do this (sucks for console players maybe)

I also used to think like this but this is a paradox. They want to keep the arcade gamers also happy, people just coming in and going away is not the ideal game for them. So they need to keep arcade mode only for comp queue but they want to keep games between similar mmr as bronze vs grandmaster arcade won't be fun for either. So they need a group of similar mmr people queueing up for comp, but if they have that won't they able to put them in the comp game?

This is partially solved now by introducing role q, so you would put all the dps queues into an arcade but the queue time has to be that high.

Yeah I didn't mean throw them into actual FFA matches. But just have the existing skirmish matches be on FFA maps with FFA rulesets (no teammates, everyone can kill anyone, quick respawn timer, etc.). Wouldn't even need to keep score, but you could at least have some fun shooting people

So another idea I had the other day would be some kind of simple "mini-game" to play on the landing screen while in queue. You know, something to occupy whatever hand you got on your mouse; like a match-3 variation or whatever someone in the team could come up with.

Something that makes you slightly annoyed you cannot play/click on anymore when your queue finally pops and that makes you subconsciously look forward to occupy yourself with on the side during your next queue.

I'd love some 8 Bit Hero type mini game to play. Something that you can jump in and out of at any time and still have fun. Or any of the OW universe arcade games really, Vivi's Adventure, Siege Mode 3 etc.

How Valve solves this problem in Dota is that there is trivia questions about the game, things like items, heroes, or abilities. Also you can just boot up the practice map and play around, no problem in that takes 3 clicks.

How bad are the queue times? I haven't been able to get on since the beta system went live, but I know if queues are 10+ minutes like they were showing on PTR and examples before, I'm done with competitive, there's no sense in waiting that long for a game.

Role Queue beta is probably not played as much as the actual season will be played, since SR gains are irrelevant atm. So queue times might be longer than they will be once the actual Season goes live.